posts categorized as add-ons

Earlier this year, while working on a presentation for our AMO brownbag, Nick Nguyen turned to me and said “AMO is like a Renegade Craft Fair“. I figured this was an obscure Star Trek reference, as is often the case when I don’t know what he’s talking about. But he persisted, and decided that we should actually have a booth at the real Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco. The idea was that the add-ons community loves to make things, and people that come to craft festivals appreciate that and love to customize things.

I had no idea what to expect, but I picked up some interns and drove to San Francisco this morning for the first day. We set up our booth, complete with Firefox swag and 2 computers to demo add-ons and Personas. The crowds started coming, and it was really exciting to hear almost everyone we talked to already used Firefox. In fact, most people’s response to “do you Firefox?” was “of course”. Most of the events I’ve been to for Mozilla are tech-oriented, so interacting with this crowd was really fun and interesting. We introduced lots of people to add-ons and Personas, converted a few people to Firefox, and taught some of the more technical folks a few tricks.

We even had a planet.mozilla.org reader from the community come out and help us out for several hours — thanks James! (please email me)

Plus, I picked up some awesome robot artwork from 3 Fish Studios. Eric said a bunch of people had emailed him about Mozilla’s robot design challenge and that he’d be entering, which was great to hear.

There’s still another day left of the craft festival in San Francisco tomorrow (Sunday), so I encourage anyone in the San Francisco area to check it out at Fort Mason, and be sure to stop by the Mozilla booth. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back next year, Mozilla-sponsored or not!

The Renegade Craft Fair is this weekend in San Francisco, and is a “FREE urban art, craft and DIY extravaganza”. I’m excited to be attending to promote Firefox add-ons and Personas to a crowd that loves customization. Mozilla will have a booth set up both days, so if you’re in the San Francisco area, please stop by and see us.

Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.

As someone whose job is working with Firefox Add-ons every single day, you can imagine my shock when I learned that IE has almost all of the features of our top add-ons built right in! I did some research trying to figure out how this could have happened, and realized that, like much of the “Get the Facts” section, it is completely untrue.

It’s a question I’m asked fairly often, and my response is usually “it depends”. addons.mozilla.org (AMO) is a pretty complex system, so answering a simple question like “how many add-ons are there?” isn’t so easy when you consider that there are 7 types of add-ons, different status levels, and several supported applications. And of course, not all add-ons are hosted on AMO. My answer to that question to someone looking for consumer-friendly Thunderbird add-ons would differ by thousands from my answer to a web developer who wants to extend Firefox to its fullest.

A few weeks ago I had the idea of a self-service chart that I could point people to when they ask me this question, and here it is.